April 2013: Lunations of April Rock the World

This month’s astrology gets steamy—that is, transition-from-water-to-fire steamy. As Eric Francis describes, New and Full Moons this April are potent astrological events that bring us into the growing sensation of "all chaos, all the time," along with a mixture of passion and getting lost in ideas of how things should be, or should have been. Fortunately, with an eclipse in the mix, there’s also a theme of letting go that, over the next few weeks, we’ll all get a chance to explore. For this month's horoscopes, see Planet Waves Horoscopes: April 2013.

New and Full Moons this April are potent astrological events that will continue the fiery theme that has been brewing through late March. One by one, planets have been transitioning from Pisces to Aries, tipping the feeling and experience of the astrology from water to fire. The New and Full Moons of April also bring us into the first of two eclipse seasons in 2013.

Let's start with the Aries New Moon, which takes place April 10. For this event, there are six planets in Aries, five of them concentrated into a narrow band of sky with the new planet Eris at the center. You could call this the Eris New Moon. We'll have a "proving moment" for Eris (discovered in 2005, named in 2006), when we get another example of how this planet works. Sometimes a New Moon close to a newly discovered planet will bring a revelation about what that planet is here to show us.

Aries New Moon Conjunct Eris

Let's run through what's in Aries as of the New Moon on the 10th. Uranus is in there, about to make its third of seven squares to Pluto (which happens on May 20). Then, we have that grouping of planets right around Eris—the Sun and Moon to one side, and Venus and Mars to the other side.

Eris is the sensation of "all chaos, all the time." It's the times in which we live. I trace this back to the Sixties, though it's been ramping up exponentially year by year since then. Eris describes a state of global chaos as well as a personal sense of being overwhelmed. It's also about the persistent question: "Who am I?" Yet one is fortunate to be in a position to ask that; typically, it's just experienced as confusion. And there is plenty of that going around lately.

Young people in particular have little in the way of structure they can hold onto, and if they do, they are also witnesses to a world that seems to be falling apart day by day.

The twin conjunctions on either side of Eris seem to represent two possible states of relating. To one side is the Sun and the Moon, an image of mother and father, or a traditional concept of relationship. To the other side is a conjunction of Venus and Mars, which is at least a meeting between two peers. However, in this equation Venus is in the sign of Mars—it's out of character. And while Mars rules Aries, it's not always feeling so confident there either.

This describes many modern relationships where men and women are out of character, or where people of the same sex are sorting out gender roles. So it's a little of the old and the new, side by side—with a kind of chaos membrane between them. In reality, human relationships have more in common than social activists would like us to think. We are all people, alive at the same time, participating in the same society, doing our best to meet our emotional needs and offer what we can to others.

Scorpio Full Moon: Partial Eclipse

The Aries New Moon is followed by the Scorpio Full Moon of April 25. The Sun ingresses Taurus on April 19, and soon after is followed by the Full Moon. Planets will be ingressing Taurus through the month, and by the time of the Full Moon, Mars, the Sun, Pallas Athene, Venus, and the South Node will be collected there.

The Scorpio Full Moon has two different feeling tones. One is indicated by the concentration of personal planets in Taurus, including Venus and Mars. That has a passionate feeling to it; a desire for physicality and connection.

The Sun is conjunct Mars, which lends passion and drive, as well as a need to express energy physically. I think this will be meaningful to honor, despite the possible distractions. That is the whole point of focusing passion: to be able to keep your focus sufficiently to power through the noise, static, and obstructions of the world.

Taurus also has a mental quality that evades the very physicality that it represents. It can be lost in fantasy or lost in an idea of how things should be, or should have been. The mental quality of this event is hinted at by Venus conjunct asteroid Pallas Athene. Pallas was the goddess born directly from her daddy's head, in a full suit of armor, ready for action. That seems to color her whole delineation—the notion of nonsexual birth, from dad, seemingly as the product of his mind. Just imagine her bursting out with her helmet and spear.

Pallas therefore has a distinctly mental quality. We have an image of getting lost in one's head, doing too much to plot strategy, or striving to impress others with one's intelligence. Pallas has a theme of daddy-pleasing, something we do more of than we think. In many ways, the world is a story of daddy worship, from fussing over the pope to thinking the president runs the country to adherence by nearly everyone to patriarchal ways of organizing society, even though we know there are alternatives.

For this event, Mars is opposite the Moon. And the Moon is conjunct Saturn. These two aspects lend a reflective, heavy, and at times frustrating quality. Fortunately this chart is an eclipse, and that's suggesting a theme of letting go of that which is frustrating. It may be necessary to take things from the mental level to the emotional level in order to work this out. It's not always obvious when your mind is tied up that your real situation is emotional in nature, which could imply physical—emotions tend to be closer to the body than is the mind.

This eclipse is the first of three. It's followed two weeks later by an annular eclipse of the Sun in Taurus. That happens May 9, in the season of Beltane. And then May 24-25, there is another lunar eclipse on the Sagittraius-Gemini axis. I'll have more about those charts a little closer to the events.